New Year’s Eve.
Our tradition for, heck, fifteen years has been to have fondue! And I’ve spent some portions of the grocery visits in the last week trying to make sure I can put hands on enough of the ingredients to ensure that we keep this tradition going.
Unfortunately, our success in finding something worth exploring yesterday meant that we did NOT get into a grocery store, and the first concern was that maybe all the grocery stores would be closed today. Still no clue how the holidays work so it’s probably 50/50 whether the stores will be open or not.
Fortunately, we found our main place was open, and I was able to put hands on all the necessary ingredients — gouda (although just all young stuff, not aged gouda, the recipe wants some of both), a baguette, white wine (plenty), some potatoes, and some Vienna sausages. Even found little bags of cayenne pepper and nutmeg (although the cayenne is just marked “chili powder” and I only confirmed that it was cayenne by … tasting it).
But before the fondue, a diversion. So far, we really hadn’t been into the city proper — we tried one weekend, parked the car, but the wind was pretty impressive and would have made it less than fun to walk around. So after our exploring yesterday, I found a parking spot down by the waterfront restaurants and felt pretty lucky, so I pushed to take a little stroll. (I’m saying “pushed” but it wasn’t like H wasn’t up for it, it’s just easy sometimes to put stuff like that off when you have months in a place.)
So I had the parking spot, and we decided to take a quick tour through the pedestrian mall and see what might be open. The town square ended up being close to that north end of town, and a couple of cafes were open, so we grabbed a table and got a beer and a glass of wine and sat enjoying the town square and the giant Christmas tree in the center. The cafe closed up (with the waitress telling us we were the last customers of 2023) and we finished a walk up and down the ped mall before heading back to the house.
And back at the cottage, the tradition lives on. Made the fondue and despite some small adjustments, it was delicious as always. Cottage even came with little forks perfect for dunking bread in cheese.
The second half of the tradition is watching serial killer documentaries (we finally aged out of bad movies after the Rock of Ages debacle), and tonight’s offering was an “in his own words” kind of piece on the Unabomber.
Nothing says “ring out the old” like homemade pipe bombs.
There was a little flurry of fireworks throughout town at midnight, which we could see from the front patio. The fireworks came with a chorus of dogs howling from the neighbor up the hill.
All in all, a perfect end to what has been an absolutely crazy year.